Hello. I’m Wendy Pratt, an author, poet, mentor and editor. My books include The Ghost Lake (The Guardian called it a ‘remarkable memoir’), Blackbird Singing at Dusk (an Observer book of the month) and When I Think of My Body as a Horse (winner of the Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition).
I write across genres but I’m probably best known as a poet. You may even have taken some of my courses and workshops, I get about a bit. Themes in my work include feelings of being out of step with society: as an infertile woman in a fertile world, as a bereaved mother in a world focussed on family, as a working class woman in a middle class dominated field, as a woman with a strange brain (I’m into my fourth year of waiting for an assessment to see if there is a name for the brilliant strangeness of my mind). Wherever I am, whoever I am, I always seem to be writing from the margins. I think perhaps I like it here.
I have always been a history nerd. This came to a head when I wrote The Ghost Lake, and took a series of pilgrimages around a Stone Age lake site, acknowledging the people who came before me, as a way to connect myself back into my own life, as you do. My current work is historical fiction, so if you like books, history, nature, quiet moments of contemplation and exploring what it means to be a human being, you are in the right place.
I am a full time writer and mostly to be found in my little spare room office in semi-rural North Yorkshire, maybe just having come in from walking over the fields or across the ghost lake, or round through the woods where my current WIP is set. I will be surrounded by books. I will be writing, trying to pull onto the page something that did not previously exist. I never get tired of this process, and that’s what Notes from the Margin is, a chance to look into the writer life: my life, my work, my research, my diaries, as authentically as possible. Notes that skip across reading stacks, memoir, poetry, fiction, writing around caring, grief, rejection and acceptance.
What I Offer
For free subscribers
At least two free posts a month, notes delivered directly into your inbox.
Occasional Dear Writer advice column posts.
For Paid Subscribers
Seasonal Zoom Writing Workshops.
Monthly Zoom write Along Groups.
Occasional Author Interviews.
Paywalled Diary Posts.
Writing Prompts.
Access To the Archives.
Dear Writer advice column posts
Notes from the Margin goes out (usually) on a Thursday morning. I usually post once a week, but occasionally post more than once.
Thank you
for subscribing, whichever plan you choose, I’m happy that you are here.
